I wanted to see if, using all the evidence we have to date, a case could be made for Intelligent Design of one sort or another. The reason I took evolution off the table for this discussion was to not have this turn into yet another “I.D. must be true because evolution has too many holes in it” fight. Are aliens the best solution so far, or would it take a Christian-type “God” to pull it off? How can the fossils be explained via I.D.? What time-frame are we talking about?
Listen if you cant respond to my points, or if you think my post are irrelevant then why are you asking me to comment or explain? If you can refute anything I said, or if you question my logic, then do it like a grown up. Give details, & do it point by point. Anyone can hand waive away. If there is anyone who wants to have a point by point debate discussion or whatever else you want to call it concerning the second subject I was going to address, namely the false impression some have out there that Behe’s Bacteria flagellum argument concerning IC has been refuted. Then let me know. Again, only serious people. Please no posers. I dont need to resort to tricks and you cannot cite anything I have said as trickery in any detail.
Too late. That ship has sailed. It hit a rock in Dover and sank with all hands.
Have you read the OP(Opening Post)? Do you understand what the topic of conversation is here? What part of
are you having difficulty with?
edited to add: If you wish to disprove evolution, could you please start another thread about that subject-this ain’t it.
The point I was making, and as I cited by documenting the evidence, is that junk DNA was a failed prediction of evolutionary theory I even cited…
Science 7 September 2012:
Vol. 337 no. 6099 pp. 1159-1161
DOI: 10.1126/science.337.6099.1159
•
GENOMICS
ENCODE Project Writes Eulogy for Junk DNA
.
The larger point is that ID theorist predicted for many years that important function would eventually be found in the genome. We went from only 2% to 20% to 45% and now we are up to 80% and climbing. Again this was my point. In spite of this paper being cited in two major and well respected journals, there are still some out there denying the accumulation of empirical evidence of the last few years. This is addition to the points I made in previous post concerning fine tuning, and I will not respond to questions already answered concerning fine tuning, and will only suggest that if your interested you can go back and see the arguments presented as well as the responses given.
Why are you telling me this? My initial post concerned the topic. The only reason why we got to this point is because I was gracious enough to follow all the red herring arguments that you and others have put forth in a responses stemming from my initial post. Lets not be a hypocrite.
Are you under the impression that a broad scientific theory has to get every prediction correct?
You have not cited their exact prediction. Did they predict exactly how this portion of the dna affected the cell? Or was it a general prediction that everything is useful. (Like the appendix?)
I notice you still haven’t said whether the scientists who now accept the new findings think it is support for ID.
Democritus and subsequent atomists predicted the atom. However if you read their work you will find that their arguments were about as flawed as those of their opponents. If enough people predict enough things, some of them are right.
And you still haven’t mentioned a coherent theory of ID. Stopped clocks are right twice a day, but I wouldn’t want to depend on one.
Only at a fairly naive level. Let’s face it, living things are MAGNIFICENT! The intricacy of such things as the mammalian immune system – or simply the mammalian brain! – are staggering. Beautiful! Wondrous beyond all wonder.
But ID falls apart in the details. There are too many extant indications of prior forms, and too many things that are just so damn rickety, so jim-crack, so jerry-rigged and jury-built, that the designer, rather than being intelligent as we understand the word, had to have been a drugged-out loony!
In ordinary scientific terms, the theory doesn’t explain the facts better than other theories; in fact, it does a lot worse.
In one sense, aliens could trivially have done it: they visit, the flush their toilets, they leave. Life grows. This is one entirely plausible notion regarding the origin of life on earth.
Could aliens have come to earth 10 million years ago and built up life-forms de novo, as some kind of amusement park? The problem is that they can only have done so while also creating the appearance of greater age – such as the algae mats from billions of years ago. The whole Omphalos problem. Why would they have made dinosaurs and mammals and things…and laid down fossils that look as if they were ancestors of both lines?
The only idea that works is that the aliens built the first living things at the very beginning of all life, and then either went away, or perhaps stayed around and secretly guided events – a nudge here, an asteroid there – till they got something they wanted. The 2001: A Space Odyssey model.
It doesn’t require a theological entity. (And, anyway, per Clarke’s Law, once the aliens get to the point where they can write genetic sequences the way we write romance novels, the difference between an “alien” and a “god” pretty much disappears!)
Yes I’m under the impression that all true scientific theories no matter how broad, have to make accurate predictions, and that theories that have a history of making false predictions fail as true scientific theories. I already responded to what ID literally predicted and what we have been speaking about for years. Your “stop clocks” analogy would not work as a scientific argument, but makes a great political slogan. (In fact I have to remember that old line because it’s so old I forgot it.) I already defined ID theory in earlier post. Now again someone asked about cilia, or at least thats the term they used when responding to what I said, when I specifically mentioned the bacterial flagellum, but I guess his biologist wife was not inclined to help him concerning this so called refutation claim. To bad, I was kind of interested in knowing just why some mistakenly believe Behe’s model has been scientifically refuted. Who knows? Maybe theres something I missed and it has been refuted.
Sylvia Browne and Jeanne Dixon made predictions, too, some of which came true. Are they therefore gods or scientists?
And I don’t believe you have responded to a cite request for this prediction. Who is this ID theorist and what did he base his prediction upon?
- Has ID ever been known to make inaccurate predictions?
- When you refer to ID, who/what do you personally have in mind as the Designer? This question directly relates to the “Whodunnit” mentioned in the title of this thread.
You still haven’t said what the exact prediction was. Details matter.
My point about the clocks - and about atomists - was that the mechanism for the prediction also matters. That is why you support a theory with a lot of data points, not just one. I can see why an IDer would say all parts of the gene are important, but I don’t see how ID leads to specific predictions of mechanisms. You might get to an “all parts of the gene are important” prediction also by saying natural selection throws out useless segments. If someone had predicted that, how do you decide which viewpoint is correct?
It is unlikely that all parts of a theory are going to be correct. Darwin got the mechanism of inheritance totally wrong, for example. The telling point is that when we found the right mechanism, it supported his major view better than his.
As for Behe, what model are you talking about? In detail he has suggested several IR structures, some of which have evolutionary mechanisms leading to them suggested. As I said, no one is going to bother spending time and money responding to all of them. Without really clear IR structures (and they should include simple mechanisms, not just complex ones) there is nothing to refute. As I said, there is nothing supernatural about ID - we do it all the time.
What IDers have to demonstrate is that it actually happened.
I’d suggest that a fair set of predictions from the basic principles of ID (whatever they are - you haven’t answered that question either) would be very different from what we see.
The reason science rejected plain vanilla creationism over two centuries ago is that creationism makes some very specific predictions of what we should see - traces of the flood, evidence of population growth as you would expect from 3 couples filling the earth - all of which have not shown up. So, what predictions do IDers make?
If you think that so called physic predictions are analogous to scientific predictions concerning scientific theories, then not only do you not understand how scientific theories are constructed, but you also destroy the whole foundation of what scientific theories are largely based on, especially concerning the historical sciences. Are sure you want to use this political “Nuclear option” response? As for who this ID theorist is. Its not a who. It is many. Havent you stayed in touch with the argument and debates of at least the last 20 years?
I even cited two examples of Miller and Dawkins trying to refute the no junk argument as predicted by ID theorist. In fact, if you want to know how some are still trying to counter the argument, don’t take it from me. Go to one of the who calls himself the Paris Hilton of atheism and Mister denial himself… professor PZ Myers. (see…Rummaging About in the Genetic Junkyard Skepticon 4 PZ Myers)
Correction, meant to say “psychic” predictions not physic predictions.
You appear to not comprehend the difference between a precise prediction and a generic one. I’ve asked you several times now for details on exactly what is predicted, and you refuse to answer except with the generality above.
Behe, who at least understands what he is doing, has been looking for IR structures,. and apparently failing. (That is when he isn’t selling out to the creationists for fame and fortune.) Besides that, ID work has been to try to find supposedly low probability things to prove that we can’t have arisen by chance. Thus the constants. Thus the uniqueness of earth as an abode of life. But we don’t know if the constants are very interesting (independent) and we don’t know how many chances they were. Getting a royal flush in one shuffle looks like design, getting one in a million shuffles looks normal.
And it appears that they have been busy finding small flaws in the current theory (or rather, reporting that real scientists have found the flaws) and then claiming ID must be true.
And you still don’t seem to get why disputes among scientists about the details lend no credence at all to ID - unless one of the sides is convinced that ID is the only answer, which is definitely not the case.
And you also still haven’t give a theory of ID.
This, most especially, as Czarcasm has gone to some effort to remind us that this is what he wanted in the OP. Can we – anyone? – sketch out a theory of ID?
The best I can possibly do is this: about four billion years ago, technologically advanced aliens came here, intelligently designed the very first living cells, and released them.
Maybe the cells had some really good coding, some very subtle and deep information, so that, after a very long time, some form of intelligent life would arise on earth. But this is icing on the cupcake. That life was deliberately seeded here is the theory.
The good part of this idea is that it doesn’t contradict any known evidence.
The bad part is that it isn’t testable at this time, and doesn’t offer us any insight.
Also, it doesn’t provide for intelligent design of whales and snails, only of life itself. Evolution is still the only working model for “The Origin of Species.”
I think that is the crux of the matter. Scientific theories are not based upon a prediction that God Did It, but that is all you have to offer.
The prediction was that a designer would not have made a bunch of useless vestigial junk. Evolutionary theorist said just the opposite. They said evolutionary theory did predict there would be a bunch of useless vestigial junk. They were wrong. Its that simple. Why is that hard to understand? When neo Darwinist made the prediction that humans would have the most amount of genetic information, since it was assumed that we were the most advance creatures and at the top of the of food chain, nobody asked evo theorist to be precisely sure just how much genetic information they were predicting, only that it would be more than a so called “simple” creature like a protist. They were wrong. This is called C value enigma. We now know that among eukaryotes, an organism complexity cannot be determined be genome size and that even a lowly protozoa can have more genetic information than man by orders of magnitude which is an example of another failed prediction. As for the precision question of yours, you’re using the oldest trick in the book. Its called the old changing the goal post trick.
Behe has cited an example of an IC/ Irreducibly complex structure in the form of the bacterial flagellum. I dont know what you mean by “IR” structure. And you are wrong. Even one of Behe’s biggest critics Eugenie Scott admits that IC systems are one of the valid claims of ID theory. She does not deny they exist. She simply believes that neo Darwinian mechanism can explain them. Unfortunately she nor anyone else has been able to produce a detailed plausible model based on empirical or even testable theoretical evidence. There best evidence is repeating the mantra that evolutionary theory cannot give a detailed account.
You can talk all you want, but you have not provided any scientific evidence to refute Behe’s argument. and neither has anyone else, and instead they got a judge (who knows nothing about science) to try to discredit it, but even he couldn’t do that, and merely attacked ID as a whole. Scientific theories are constructed and eventually determined by other scientist in peer review articles and books based on observable data as what is happening as we speak. Citing on line documented evidence is fine, but If you dont understand IC well enough to argue the finer details and in your own words, then maybe you should move on.
I cited the theory of ID several post ago. If your interested then google “the theory of Intelligent design” it is very easy and accesible. In fact I just did it for you lazy bones…
The bacterial flagellum was brought up endless times in the Dover trial, so much so that Judge Jones complained, “We’ve seen all this before.” I am not qualified to argue this with you, but I would like to suggest you acquire a book called Monkey Girl, about that trial, and I think it will lead you to some intelligent refutations of Behe’s claims.
Basically, several examples have been discovered that show that the “irreducible complexity” is a figment of Behe’s imagination, and there are several less-complex mechanisms that work very well in some species. This made his mousetrap argument moot, as all parts of the “mousetrap” have been shown to be of some use at some time, not requiring the entire, complete assemblage first.
Behe refused to acknowledge any of them existed, or that he had read any of the studies.
This:
seems to directly contradict this:
in that ID supporters have already make their conclusion coming in, then collect evidence to support their pre-established position. Please note that when people here ask for the Theory of Intelligent Design, they mean “theory” as it is defined in the scientific community, not just an idea a bunch of people support.